According to the New York Times there is yet another pressure on global food prices, lack of crop research. Due to food surpluses over the last few decades, developed countries stopped investing in agricultural research that would benefit the developing world. Non-governmental agricultural research institutions like the International Rice Research Institute have seen their budgets stagnate or drop in the last 35 years and staff numbers have been drastically reduced. This, despite the critical role rice plays in feeding almost half the world’s population.
The U.S. has an annual global agricultural research network budget of $59.5 million, administered through USAID, which it is looking to reduce by as much as 75%, according to the article. USAID is fighting the cuts. My instinct says that there is a link here to the whole GMO industry. It reads a lot like our own domestic cuts in medical research that were then “made up for” by private industry. Only instead of developing a cure for heart disease, they were developing a cure for toenail fungus and covering up the data on renal failure if you took the “cure” too long. It seems that here we have a case where Monsanto can jump in to rescue agricultural development and, concomitantly, push their genetically modified seeds as the solution. It seems no coincidence that the Bush Aid package to address current food crises is pushing GMOs.
It is interesting, too, that in the cases of the 14 main NGO agricultural organizations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, they are doing the research, but lack the funds to get the crops into the hands of the poor and to properly store the resistant strains they do develop. The Rice Institute has pest resistant rice that it can’t get into the hands of rice farmers because there is no budget to breed the strain. They also abandoned promising research on heat resistant varieties for lack of funds. Mexico’s International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center has drought resistant corn and disease resistant wheat, but no budget to get seeds to African or South Asian farmers. Yet, the U.S. is going to come up with $150 million to get GMO seeds to Africa and Asia. What is wrong with this picture?
As insidious, World Bank and first world loans for things like improved farming methods have been cut by more than 50% over the last 25 years. In the case of the World Bank, these loans have been reduced to about ¼ of what they once were. Why? Perhaps it made no economic sense for the U.S. to continue to encourage agricultural self-sufficiency when we had so much cheap, abundant grain that we wanted the third world to buy. But then we decided to throw that grain production into more lucrative biofuels, along with a host of other priorities that have put feeding the world’s hungriest low on the list.
Robert Bertram, who oversees the funding for the United States Agency for International Development, said he was still trying to stop the cuts and argued that research to improve crop yields was “like putting money in the pockets of poor people, and I mean billions of poor people.” -- The New York TimesPerhaps putting money in the pockets of billions of poor people is precisely what the U.S. doesn’t want to do. Let’s face it, U.S. food aid policy has been to glut markets with surplus American grain and put money in the pockets of U.S. agribusinesses, not buy locally grown products that might help boost local economies. A cynic might believe that now that we are running out of surpluses and we have nothing to flood the market, we still aren’t interested in supporting local agriculture. Even if we won’t be the world’s bread basket, we can perhaps turn a nicer profit as food supplies dwindle.
Food production rates have been on a downward spiral vis a vis population growth since 1990, yet income in some of the poorest countries has been increasing for certain sectors, allowing people from higher socio-economic strata to consume more. Those two pressures have contributed to where we are today with as many as 100 million people globally facing the possibility of malnutrition. We must go back to making the eradication of hunger the priority that it was in the 1960’s, while putting money into the real research and policies that can help to feed the world.
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